The Misbehaving Character
By Devon Ellington
Copyright © 2008 by Devon Ellington, All Rights Reserved
We've all had it happen. We
have a great idea for a story, our fingers fly across the keyboard and
then, boom! The character stops doing what we want, what we need, what
we've planned the character to do. The character goes off and
does something else: something unexpected, out of our comfort zone, and
way off the outline!
How do you handle a
character who becomes rebellious? When you've got a lovely plot
outlined, and your character decides, "No way! That's not what I'd do!"
and goes off in a completely different direction? A few years ago, this
discussion came up during a writers' conference in a bar. I wish I
could remember the name of the author, but she vehemently declared that
she was in charge, and her characters did whatever she
decided, she was the god figure in her created universe, and the
characters had no say in the matter. I can't remember her name or
anything she's written, so I don't know how her universe works.
In my experience, there are
several choices:
1. Play God and refuse
your characters the leeway to follow their paths. Stick closely to
your original plot and storyline, without veering from it in the
least.
2. Allow your character
to veer off on tangents. See if any of it works. See if the
character (also known as a section of your subconscious) knows more
about the story than you do. Once you've followed the tangent or
tangents, look back on it with an editor's eye, not a writer's eye.
See what serves the story the best. Keep it, and cut the rest.
3. Completely follow
your character's lead and change your story/outline/view of this
particular fictional world to the new path your character carves.
4. Dump the story and
the character; start something new. Maybe come back to this piece
in the future. Or don't.
Any of these options might
make sense, depending on the writer and the situation. I asked three of
my favorite writers (and people) about their experiences in this realm,
and they provided some interesting anecdotes.
Jackie Kessler, author of
Hell's Belles, The Road to Hell, and the upcoming Hotter Than
Hell, said:
Okay, recent example:
In Hotter Than Hell (August 2008), the chapter was supposed to
open with the main character talking to his friend, a dancer in a
strip club, to get information. But I had a hell of a time writing
the scene. Without sounding too schizophrenic, I hope, the main
character wanted to watch his friend dance first. The silent
(fictional) conversation went like this:
ME: Daun, come on, the
readers have had two books of watching Jesse dance. Who cares about
watching her dance? You need to talk to her to get the info you
need.
DAUN: I want to watch
her dance.
ME: No.
DAUN: Then I ain't
workin'.
And sure enough:
writer's block. So finally, I caved and wrote the intro scene with
him watching her dance. And man, it was a killer scene — it really
solidified (to the reader) his feelings for her, and it also wound
up revealing an important piece of information in and of itself.
So my advice is this:
If your characters start tugging you in another direction, let them
run. See where they take you. Sure, it might be completely different
from what you want, and what you expect. But it also might be pure
gold.
Novelist, poet, editor, and
publisher Colin Galbraith adds:
When my characters start
to want to do their own thing, I figure it's because they have grown
from being a basic character sketch into a multi-dimensional
character that lives and breathes in my imagination. They have
become mature and rounded enough, and have developed their own sense
of 'being', and it is their own will and 'life force' making them
want to go the way they do. It's a great feeling, but takes a bit of
practice, to be able to trust your story in the hands of someone who
doesn't exist; but because they are the story, it is them who
must tell it in whatever way is true to them. Like stepping out over
a ledge into the darkness of the unknown, a writer must have faith
in the very characters they have brought to life, and trust in them
to tell the story, to guide the writer, and help them see the way.
Jenny Gardiner finds that
following the character's lead can give both writer and reader a deeper
understanding:
My novel Sleeping
With Ward Cleaver is told through the first person POV of my
protagonist, Claire Doolittle. I wanted to take an unhappy
housewife, albeit with a razor-edge sense of humor and an ability to
laugh at herself, and let her swirl into a cocktail of mid-life
crisis hell. The interesting thing is her husband, Jack, the
putative Ward Cleaver of the book, just kept rearing his ugly head
and asking me to soften him up and make him more sympathetic. I'd
originally had a bit more of a 'go-girl' thing happening, you know
how it is, sitting around with a bunch of girlfriends drinking wine
and everyone is bitching about their husband and buttressing one
another by sneering at the men's transgressions. I wanted to give it
that slant for Claire on behalf of all of those disgruntled
housewives out there. But Jack kept nudging himself in and he kept
reminding me that he can't help it he's a guy and really, he means
well, even if he can be a lunkheaded oaf at times. Eventually I
gave him the benefit of the doubt and gave everyone a reason to like
him even though he'd become such an officious presence in Claire's
life.
In my own writing, I tend to
gravitate towards Option 2, with maybe a touch of Option 3 tossed in. I
trust my characters to behave in ways that are true to them, and I trust
my subconscious to know more about what I'm doing than I do. I'll make
some changes, but won't let a single character dictate the entire scope
of the piece, unless my theme is the protagonist's self-discovery and
I'm making the journey entirely with the character as I write. The less
I try to consciously control the process in the first draft, the higher
the quality of the writing on the page. In subsequent drafts, I impose
more structure, rearrange, and finesse, but for early drafts, I find
trusting the characters and following their leads takes me to more
interesting places than those I'd think of on my own.
References:
Gardiner, Jenny.
Sleeping With Ward Cleaver. Published by Love Spell, 2008.
ISBN- 13: 978-0505527479;
Kessler, Jackie.
Hell's Bells. Published by Zebra Books, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-0821781029.
Kessler, Jackie. The
Road to Hell. Published by Zebra Books, 2007. ISBN-13:
978-0821781036.
Kessler, Jackie.
Hotter Than Hell. To be published by Kensington Books, 2008.
ISBN-13: 978-0821781043.
Devon Ellington
publishes under a half a dozen names in both fiction and
non-fiction, appearing in publications as varied as FemmeFan,
Espresso Fiction, The Scruffy Dog Review, Wild Child, The
Crafty Traveler, and SavvyGal. Her blog on the
writing life, Ink in My Coffee, is on:
http://devonellington.wordpress.com.
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